Tacc Podcasts

Any truck operator knows that hydraulics do the heavy lifting. Water does the work because it’s nearly incompressible at normal scales. But things behave strangely in nanotechnology, the control of materials at the scale of atoms and molecules. Using supercomputers, scientists found a surprising amount of water compression at the nanoscale. These findings could help advance medical diagnostics through creation of nanoscale systems that detect, identify, and sort biomolecules. The unexpected effect comes from the action of an electric field on water in very narrow pores and in very thin materials. That’s according to research by Aleksei Aksimentiev and James Wilson of the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. They published their findings in Physical Review Letters, June of 2018. Aksimentiev and Wilson used supercomputer time awarded through XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discover Environment, funded by the National Science. Foundation. XSEDE allocations allowed t